This year Jessie Ware led a masterclass in sexy, soulful R&B with Devotion, while Aussie psych rockers Pond blew my socks off with the riotously fun Beard, Wives, Denim; but in truth there was only one person who truly stole my heart and thousands of others with an album of immense melancholy, bruised emotions and fractious melodies.
Of course, that person is Sharon Van Etten, and in Tramp we found an album to break up and get back together with, to fall asleep alone at night and trudge to work in the cold and the rain, to feel embittered with the world and content with your lot, all at once. Opener “Warsaw” alone pushes the heart to breaking point with Sharon’s mournful voice grasping at chiming guitars and cymbal splashes that burst like anguished blood vessels. Lyrically it’s more solemn than any other LP released in 2012: with odes to love at first sight (“Give Out”), suffering nightmarish spousal abuse (“Serpents”) or dealing with social anxiety (“We Are Fine”), each simple, poetic and straight from the heart. Guitars hum softly with down tempo percussion washing in and out. Save for the particularly angst-ridden “Serpents”, where the influence of producer, The National’s Aaron Dessner can be felt strongest, Sharon’s voice is the absolute focal point of the arrangement.
Although bleak and despondent on the surface, Tramp is more an album of cautious optimism than a document of SVE’s spiral into the abyss; things have been pretty shitty for all of us in the past but now we’re dealing with it, together.
